Americans honor history not so much by forgetting it
as by turning into a Disney movie. Nothing too scary, nothing
ambiguous, above all nothing shameful. The Civil War was a big mistake
that really had nothing much to do with slavery. The internment of the
Japanese and Japanese American was a forgivable burst of enthusiasm.
Segregation was a slight breach in manners; Martin Luther King was a
jolly cross between Polonius and Santa Claus.

To be sure, most obituarists rather diffidently
praised Kilpatrick for moving away from his earlier segregationist
views, which were then forgotten in a burst of admiration for his
writings on grammar and usage.

Almost none of the obituaries
noted that he did terrible damage to the United States
Constitution--damage for which he never even weakly apologized, and
which continues to do harm to the national dialogue today.

Kilpatrick's
death comes in the midst of a new burst of pseudo-constitutional
ugliness--with attacks on religious freedom, birthright citizenship, and
federal civil-rights protections increasingly dominating the right-wing
airwaves and the blogosphere. As I watch governors "reclaim" their
state's "sovereignty" and legislators attack newborn children as "anchor
babies," I am flooded with a sick déjà vu. I lived through this once
before; and in that earlier cantata of hate, Kilpatrick was one of the
choirmasters.

Jack Kilpatrick was my hometown newspaper editor
during my childhood in Richmond, Virginia. I never met him and have
been given to understand that he was a genial soul. But in print he was
a racist dragon. His writings were hateful, but more than that, they
were effective. Almost single-handedly, Kilpatrick laid the
intellectual foundations for "massive resistance," the extremist
Southern strategy of defying the Supreme Court by closing public schools
to thwart court desegregation orders.

When Brown v. Board of
Education was decided in 1954, a remarkable number of Southern leaders
quietly expressed a willingness to comply. As segregationists, they
weren't pleased; but the rule of law called for obedience to the Court.

A
few, the most dedicated racists, would have none of it. "Segregation
today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" George C. Wallace
memorably proclaimed. Wallace was a vulgarian; but the intellectual
leader of the "segregation forever" movement was James J. Kilpatrick.
Using the editorial columns of The Richmond News Leader, he made
Virginia and then the South too hot to hold any white leader who talked
of compromise.

Kilpatrick supplied a constitutional theory to
justify defiance, and it is one that will seem familiar to anyone who
follows the Tea Party movement today. The Supreme Court's
interpretations of the Constitution were wrong--not just in Brown, he
explained, but ever since 1803. "The sovereign states," not
individuals, were the only important citizens of the Union. When the
federal government, or the Supreme Court, overstepped its bounds, states
could simply "interpose" their authority and nullify their orders. The
Fourteenth Amendment (which was probably not valid anyway) did not
provide for racial equality. The Tenth Amendment guaranteed state
"sovereignty." The United States of 1954 was the United States of John
C. Calhoun, "unchanged by John Marshall, unchanged by the Civil War, not
altered in any way since the Constitution was created in 1787."

Kilpatrick's
concern was not simply purity of principle though; he was frank to say
it was the purity of the white race. "What has man gained from the
history of the Negro race?" he wrote in 1957. "The answer, alas, is
'virtually nothing.'" When the founders of the segregationist Prince
Edward Academy fell short in assembling a library needed for state
accreditation, Kilpatrick donated his own books to make sure that the
all-white school could open on schedule. As late as 1964 he wrote an
article for The Saturday Evening Post arguing that "the Negro race, as a
race, is in fact an inferior race." Mercifully, in view of violence
against black people in the South, the editors spiked this piece.

Which
brings us to Kilpatrick's legacy. "Kilpatrick, by propagating a whole
vernacular to serve the culture of massive resistance -- interposition,
nullification, states' rights, state sovereignty -- provided an
intellectual shield for nearly every racist action and reaction in the
coming years," Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Gene Roberts and Hank
Klibanoff wrote in their 2006 book, The Race Beat.

Ideas have
consequences, conservatives like to say. Kilpatrick's racist ideas
legitimized the worst kind of hatred, and his constitutional doctrines
gave cover to defiant Southern governors like Orval Faubus and George
Wallace.

But Kilpatrick never quite faced up to his. In later
years he admitted that his racism was a bit much. But he rewrote his
own history to make himself a moderate. ("I ardently supported [the
Voting Rights Act of 1965] because I knew, as only a white Southerner
can know, what chicanery my people had employed to prevent blacks from
voting," he wrote in 1988. In 1965, however, he was actually denouncing
that Act for striking "with the brute and clumsy force of a wrecking
ball at the very foundations of American federalism.")

The evil
that men do lives after them. Kilpatrick's ideas echo in the rhetoric
of figures like Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, Texas Gov. Rick
Perry, and Virginia Atty. Gen. Ken Cuccinelli. They want to break the
nation into 50 kingdoms, where local majorities can stigmatize and
segregate the groups that they don't like, where the federal commerce
power cannot protect citizens' health and safety, where federal civil
rights laws cannot reach intransigent local sheriffs and mobs.

We've
been here before, not just once but several times. After the Civil
War, we let ourselves forget the agony that "state sovereignty" had
inflicted. After "massive resistance," we rewrote the history to make
Martin Luther King a toothless windbag and Jack Kilpatrick a beloved
uncle. Now it may be happening a third time. The constitutional
dialogue has turned toxic; we need to remember that where "sovereignty"
and "interposition" appear in public discourse, they are usually quietly
escorted by racism and intolerance.

Historical memory is our
only protection. Sadly, that requires some harsh words in an old man's
obituary. But the alternative is worse.

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